The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets

The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets
Alyn Shipton
240 Pages
ISBN: 978-0197579763
Oxford University Press
2023

Several are the biographies of Gerry Mulligan, arguably jazz's most celebrated baritone saxophonist. None, however, have focused as specifically and as closely as this tome does on the quartets with which Mulligan made his name in the 1950s. Such focused, detailed analysis is the bread and butter of author Alyn Shipton and Oxford University Press.

Shipton, BBC Radio jazz presenter, accomplished bassist and jazz lecturer, has authored, edited and produced numerous jazz histories over many years, both in print and for radio broadcast. His meticulously researched appraisal of Mulligan's 1950s quartets is the eighth in OUP's Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz, a series dedicated to the historical, cultural and technical analysis of jazz albums.

Previous volumes have tackled Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, the studio recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1963-1968, Keith Jarrett's Köln concert and Pat Metheny's ECM output. The authors—academic researchers all—are bound as much by their love of jazz as by their passion for digging where others fear to dig.

Why, one might ask, do Mulligan's 1950s quartet's warrant a book all of their own? The answer, essentially, is that the absence of a piano or another chordal instrument in Mulligan's quartets signified an important departure from the norm at that time.

Shipton acknowledges that Mulligan might not have been the first to experiment so—Art Farmer's mention of Thelonious Monk as a trailblazer in this regard provides food for sideways thought—but the quartet's style and the decade-long extent of Mulligan's experiments set them apart from most other small jazz ensembles of the 1950s. And for Shipton, the so-called "West Coast Cool" tag that followed Mulligan was a reductive term that failed to recognize or do justice to the quartets' originality.

The chronological narrative begins and ends after the designated period of the book's title, but then context is everything. The author guides the reader from the mid- 1940s when Mulligan developed his considerable arranging skills in the big-bands of Tommy Tucker, Elliot Lawrence, Gene Krupa and Claude Thornhill. Most famously, Mulligan provided half of the arrangements and three of the songs for the 1949-1950 nonet sessions that became Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool (Capitol, 1957).

Despite Mulligan's significant contribution to Davis' "collaborative experiment," Shipton's intention is not to revise history by overstating his role. Mulligan acknowledged Davis as the catalyst for the Birth of the Cool sessions, while in a 1988 interview Gil Evans described Davis as "the prime mover." Still, the nonet sessions, Shipton states, signposted Mulligan's "future direction as both a composer and arranger," with certain ideas—paired instrumentation, spare themes, contrapuntal textures—later explored in his quartet.

Beginning in California in 1952, the quartet would be Mulligan's main vehicle for the next decade. The first quartet featured Chet Baker, bassist Bob Whitlock and drummer Chico Hamilton. Mulligan would release more than a dozen quartet albums between 1952 and 1962, with personnel evolving on a steady basis.

The celebrated quartet with Baker was, in retrospect, extremely short-lived, effectively breaking up following Mulligan's incarceration for possession of heroin in mid- 1953. Though they would attempt to rekindle the old flames in late 1957, Shipton pulls no punches in describing Reunion With Chet Baker (World Pacific, 1958) as "insipid."

Each album is dissected, song by song, with a critical eye. Mulligan's use of time signatures, the unusual length of musical segments and certain dramatic devices are all analysed. Who plays with who, the sequence of solos, what the bass and drums are doing—it is quite the forensic investigation.

At times, such detail may seem a little over the top, but the cumulative effect is akin to watching a mechanic strip an engine into its component parts and then reassemble it so that the inter-connected processes become clear. Shipton's insight and analysis lend credence to his claim that Mulligan's pianoless quartet created "a new genre of music."

Like the other titles in the Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz series, musical examples abound. Over forty transcriptions serve to highlight the quartets' head arrangements, individual parts, solos, accompanists' roles and harmonic architecture. Mulligan's sextets, tentets and the Concert Jazz Band—whose methods fed into the quartets and vice versa—are also covered. These transcriptions should prove of particular interest to musicians.

The major episodes in Mulligan's life and career are duly addressed. His key relationships, his celebrity status—even a haircut was deemed newsworthy—and his collaborations with Thelonious Monk, Stan Getz, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster and Andre Previn are all covered.

There may be little in the way of new biographical detail on Mulligan, but Shipton's own interviews with quartet members Chico Hamilton, Bill Crow, Bob Brookmeyer, Dave Bailey and Henry Grimes add nuance to his analysis of what made Mulligan tick. Other interviews with sometime collaborators Lee Konitz, John Lewis Annie Ross and George Russell, not to mention producers Ira Gitler, Bob Weinstock and Orrin Keepnews, contribute to a rounded picture of Mulligan and his musical methodology. Mulligan's voice is represented throughout courtesy of an extended interview by Charles Fox, which took place in Glasgow in 1988.

An extensive, detailed discography—with full personnel, naturally—serves as a useful reference tool.

In shining the spotlight on a defining period of Mulligan's career, Shipton leaves no stone unturned. A worthwhile addition to the literature on Gerry Mulligan and a valuable aid to understanding a transformative period of modern jazz.

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